Sadly, No!

Erick Erickson, RedState:
Palin Is In

For those who were questioning the National Council for New America based on who was not on board, one of the names of those not on board has been Sarah Palin. She is now on board.

If you can imagine the part of a parade with the Shriners in fezzes driving miniature cars, that’s the National Council for a New America — except instead of fezzes it’s ignominy, and also ignominy instead of miniature cars.

Another way to see it would be as The Five Doctors, but instead of the first five guys who played Dr. Who, you hear that familiar scrapey, sireney sound, and out of a materialized Port-a-San comes Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

Of course, as Rush said today, we don’t really need a listening tour. We need a teaching tour.

Americans think we’ve gone nuts. Let’s tell Americans to shut up and send our failed candidates out to lecture them.

Keep it up like this, Agent Erickson, and you will surely have a dacha and an automobile after the Great Redistribution.

Powerline blogger Scott Johnson is outraged that Barack Obama has apparently picked up some anti-torture ideas from Andrew Sullivan — who for all his faults has been a reliable and strident voice against waterboarding etc. since at least the Abu Ghraib revelations.

Like Falstaff in reverse, part 2

… As I said yesterday, like Falstaff in reverse, Sullivan is not only stupid, he is the cause of stupidity in others. …

Which would make Obama, in Johnson’s estimation, Prince Hal, only in reverse — an able and prudent leader, who at some point in the future (perhaps his second term? Johnson doesn’t elaborate) loses the plot.

… If Obama weren’t president of the United States, it would be laughable. To expose a man of Obama’s historical ignorance to a diet of Andrew Sullivan is like helping a victim of dehydration with water from, well, the Atlantic.

Yes, “a diet of Andrew Sullivan” would likely prove rather salty. And as a Powerline blogger steps into yet another unintentional double entendre, we can sleep peacefully, knowing all is right in the universe.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s co-blogger is also shocked that a sitting president “has time to read nonsense by an internet shill who, lacking facts to support his argument, makes them up.”

This, of course, has never ever happened before.

Assrocket’s advice: Obama should poach his torture talking points from Ann Coulter. We thank him for his concern.

“Special” Ed Morrissey, HotAir:
New DHS folly: The Domestic Extremism Lexicon

• This Department of Homeland Security document describes extremists across the political spectrum. Perhaps it will wake up the left to Napolitano’s noxious singling-out of conservative Americ…OMG, why aren’t the Muslims in here?¹

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

ABOVE: B. Daniel Blatt, aka Gay Patriot West

Shorter Gay “Patriot” West, Pajamas Media
How Perez Hilton and Gang Hurt Gay Marriage Supporters

• I have absolutely no problem with anyone saying that, as a gay man, I should have less rights than a straight person as long as they say it really nicely. In fact, if someone says “Dan, eat a shit sandwich” with a smile on his face, I will, in fact, eat a shit sandwich for him and then tell him how absolutely delicious it was and ask if I could please have another. But when mean gay people rudely tell someone that gays should have equal rights, it makes me so mad that, if I could change my vote on Prop 8, I would. By the way, it’s loads of fun being the one gay person that Glenn Reynolds and the others here at Pajamas Media like. One day I might even get to have lunch with Glenn or get his autograph or something. That would be soooo cool.

Even Shorter Gay “Patriot” West

• All gays except for me should just shut up.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Pejman Yousefzadeh, RedState:
The Obama Way: Nationalizing The Internet

• The government must not provide public access to the Internet that it created, for government stifles innovation.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Confederate Yankee:
Something Stupid This Way Comes

After all this time, he still sets us up with a Wiffle ball on top of a traffic cone.

All right then, let’s do this thing.

Confederate Yankee:
Something Stupid This Way Comes

…By the thumbing of his prick.

Moving right along:

Micheal Scheuer plays with fire:

Can you see him checking ‘Scheuer’ to make sure the tricky vowels were lined up correctly, and then putting on his hat and walking to the store while ‘Micheal’ sat there with its nose in its eye and vice versa, sighing through a sad kazoo?

Scheueuer, or however he’s spelling it these days, is a former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit and the author of Imperial Hubris, a book that offered a critique from the right of Bush’s putative War on Terror that often overlapped with critiques from the left. Scheuer has been difficult to place as a source, because while he clearly knows what he’s talking about and argues in good faith (for instance, his complex understanding of figures such as Bin Laden is rare on either side of the right-left divide), he’s also a Ron Paul devotee and a Clinton hater, with all the concomitant blind spots and weird enthusiasms that come with these ready-made and strangely invariable flavors of mind. That is, his arguments often display a finely detailed sense of the context that surrounds Islamic extremism, and that motivates its players, but an impoverished sense of his own context.

Confederate Yankee never paid any attention to Scheuer when he was criticizing the Bush administration, although he found him useful once in predicting vague but dire consequences of the jihadi terror variety if Democrats came out ahead in the ’06 elections. Here he is quoting Scheuer now:

Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying “War on Terror” and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families.

And the quote goes on from there.

The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their “moral compass,” a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder’s identifying them as “moral cowards.” Mulling Obama’s claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

And the rest of the editorial continues along those lines as well. First, here’s what Mr. Yankee saw when he read that passage:

Surprisingly, Obama now stands wubba-wubba as a genuine American Jacobin, wah-wah seeing the world as cough-cough he wants cough it to be, not as it is. Whereas wugguda-wugguda, boop-de-doop, yum yum bum-biddy-dum, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by…

Next, and seriously, it would be folly to discount Sheuer just because he’s saying something we don’t want to hear, but also folly not to compare his impression of Obama with what we know Obama is actually trying to do: to repair international relationships strained to the literal breaking point by an eight-year fugue of the same Imperial hubris that (Sheuer knows) got the US into some notable trouble in the Middle East over the past few years. There has been no genuine reason — as in non-crazy or not wished-for — to project onto Obama any notable intellectual arrogance, at least compared to other people who imagined, to whatever effect, that they could become President of the United States.

Whether Obama and his methods are up the task is another question, and there will certainly be opportunities for him to reveal his particular hamartia, the flaw which enables hubris. But among Scheuer’s ideological blind spots is an inability to understand that liberals can sometimes want the same things as conservatives — in this case security against Islamic terrorism — but will often pursue these goals in different, less heavy-handed ways. It’s like the Bad Cop seeing the Good Cop bring the suspect a cup of coffee, and getting all weird that they’re in league against him.

Mr. Yankee, though, is just an anger junkie enabled and encouraged by the spite-driven wingnut media and its billionaire clownmasters. Here’s what he creates, as though out of scavenged Lego bricks, from the above Sheuer passage:

Barack Obama is graciously willing to bet your life on his ideology, a matter of breath-taking arrogance, immaturity, and intellectual desolation, but a position we’ve come to recognize as his status quo.

Scheuer stops just short of stating that Obama is immoral or amoral; perhaps to avoid inflaming those who would see the President’s willingness to purposefully gamble “the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen” as justification for what Obama’s mentors would have glibly described in younger days as “direct action.”

If that’s hard to parse, he’s talking about armed rebellion, assassinations, blowing oneself up in a Unitarian church, and all that sort of thing. Scheuer doesn’t exactly say in so many words that Obama is immoral, because if he did, it might drive citizens to pull a Cummings — not that the DHS report on right-wing violence is anything but a cynical attack from the deranged Obamafascist police state, but it’s possible to push the American taxpayer too far, heh heh. And something is revealed when Confederate Yankee talks about violence or cruelty in that careful, cheeseparing way of his that’s subtly pungent of burnt pork and tires, and it’s hateful underneath teh funny.

It is a dangerous rhetorical game he suggests, and one that other loose cannons may be emboldened to parrot with every dangerous move this incompetent Administration makes.

Oho, he suggests, is it?

Besides which, anybody who could write a sentence in which loose cannons parrot a game is practicing a form of discursive terrorism, and is not sitting in the catbird seat, but is in fact tearing up the pea patch and hollering down the rain barrel.²

Pam Atlas has discovered someone even crazier than she is:

A LAUGHINGSTOCK IN PARIS

Dr. Wheeler has interesting friends in faraway places. He is always has the inside dirt. Every once I will run an entire piece of Jack’s because it’s too juicy not share. But subscribe to his newletter — worth every penny.

Or not. Dr. Jack Wheeler may is always has the inside dirt, but even at just 29 cents a day, the price for three such inside dirts as these …

– All forms of leftism and liberalism are based on an atavistic belief in Black Magic. All are based on the primitive fear of the envious Evil Eye.

– Russia is doomed as a culture due to its inheritance of Mongol concepts of justice and equality.

– The next insanity to come in the homosexual assault on the American Family will be PHM: Polygamous Homosexual Marriage. Pathologically promiscuous homosexuals will consider their ‘marriage’ a legalism that will in no way prevent them from adultery en masse. To maintain the pretense of ‘marriage’ however, they will have to quickly begin agitating for the legalization of group sodomization as ‘just another form of the married life-style’.

… is a bit rich for our blood. (Every once we will make a prudent financial decision.) Still, we are happy to report that Pam has liberated Dr. Wheeler’s latest “newletter” from behind its fiery dirtwall for our blessedly free amusement:

100 DAYS OF BEING A LAUGHINGSTOCK IN PARIS

Paris, France. It is very cool to be a French intel guy.

Far better than AMD, we might add.

A spectacular meal at a Parisian bistro with $90 entrées and a $200 bottle of Bordeaux? No problem. I’d known this fellow since he got me out of a jam in Sudan years ago. His James Bond days are over …

But surely that’s just writer’s block, Dr. Wheeler? Don’t give up — there must be another exciting adventure for you to invent for your imaginary interlocutor, if you consult your muse …

… but still, riding a desk for the DGSE — Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (General Directorate for External Security), France’s military intel agency — in Paris has its decided benefits.

One of them is not being infected with Obamamania. ‘My agency considers him a joke,’ he confides. ‘Every day there is some fresh lunacy that we cannot believe. Mr. Bush would often make us angry. But at this man we just laugh.’

Ahh, vérité. Nicely played, Herr Doktor. The touch with Bush, resentment from the frog spook, etc. … adds a veneer of plausibility to your account. But not really.

‘In truth, it also makes us sad,’ he continued. ‘French resentment towards America is strong, so being able to laugh at your country feels good. But it is such a sad and strange thing to see America — America The Great! — do something so crazy as to elect this ridiculous man.’

‘And the cheese, she is magnifique! But wait! I … how you say … surrendre … surrennaître … I surrender!’

‘There are many people in America who think he isn’t a legitimate president as he wasn’t born in the US and isn’t a natural citizen. What do you think?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had reason to make an inquiry.’

‘There are a lot of people convinced he is a traitor who hates America and is actively determined to destroy it. Any opinion on that?’

He didn’t shrug at this.

He did, however, hastily ask for the check.

After a long slow sip of wine, he mused, ‘I would not go that far. Many of his actions, however, are very puzzling because they are so counter-productive regarding America’s best interests. There seems to be a consistent pattern in that direction.’

‘What does Sarkozy think of him?’

‘Nothing but contempt.’

After a pause he asked, ‘And Langley?’

And Napoleon? And Ramses II? And the 16th Grand Master of the 32nd Inner Circle of the Knights Templar? Hmm? What do they think of him? Additionally, ‘Figaro-o-o-o! Figaro figaro f-i-i-ga-ro-o-o-o! I kiwwed the wa-a-a-bbit! La la la la la la la-a-a-a-a! Arriva-doi-chee! Bon voyag-ee! Aloha oy!’

‘Well, if you thought the war they waged against Bush was intense, it was nothing compared to how they’re going to screw Obama. He has tried to gut them with the ‘torture memo’ release and slashing their budgets. The morale is depressed, sullen, and enraged. You know what a left-wing outfit Langley is. They thought he was their boy and they feel betrayed. All kinds of damaging stuff on him will be appearing via their media friends.’

Even the liberal CIA torturers, etc.

He nodded. ‘And in Tel Aviv City?’

He was referring to the huge underground city complex of Langley’s underneath the US Embassy in the Israeli capital.

Which is only accessible via anachronistic phone booth (password: ‘How now brown cow’).

‘That’s an interesting question. You know how vast and deep the relationship is there. Langley is making every effort to overcome the total and massive distrust their Israeli colleagues have for Obama, whom they know is selling them down the Jordan River. So far though this effort is in words. The Israelis are waiting to see what Langley does.’

He said nothing. I smiled. ‘You guys wouldn’t be Langley’s cutout for thwarting BO regarding Israel, would you? I’d never suspect that …’

Meaning: Ha ha, I really would suspect that! We spooks are cryptic and opposite-y that way!

He continued to say nothing, gave me only a slight smile in return, and poured me another glass of wine. ‘The Bordeaux is good, yes?’ I nodded.

‘You know, the French media worships this man the same as yours in the US. All of this “100 days” talk, it is impossibly stupid. Most anyone in the French elite, the business leaders, Sarko’s people, they all know this. They all think this is some crazy joke of the Americans. But it is a very, very dangerous joke. For 100 days your president has been a laughingstock among the tout le monde No one may be laughing 100 days or 10 months from now.’

He leaned forward. ‘The world can go — how do you say — sideways with this man very quickly. No one he has working for him knows what they are doing — possibly excepting Mrs. Clinton — and he certainly does not. All of us in our little community are worried — us, our friends in Berlin, London, Tel Aviv, and Langley too as you say. It is not like the barbarians at the gates. It is everythere are no gates. …’

Or everyis one their gate, take your pick.

‘The Somalis, Chavez, Iran, Putin, Beijing, the “Norks” as you call them …’

We do?

‘… the list is long and it is growing. We are not sure what to do.’

It took me a moment to respond. ‘The best thing that has happened now is Obama making Langley his enemy. They will be cooperating with you more, be more a part of your worried community. Working together, you can undermine his efforts more effectively, block and maybe even repair the damage.’

Collaborating with foreign spies to undermine your elected president … could anything be more patriotic?

It was my turn to lean forward. ‘Then again, all together you could be more pro-active. The man is a mystery. Nobody can make public his actual birth certificate, or even the particular hospital he was born in, or his college grades, or how he got into Harvard, or how he made editor of the Harvard Law Review and never wrote a single article for it. It goes on and on. He really is a Zero. I think all of you guys should find all of this out and make it known.’

I added, ‘The quicker the better, before the laughing stops and the real dangers begin.’

‘What is that phrase you use?’ he asked. ‘Something to consider?’

I laughed. ‘Yes, there is much to consider — and much that you can do. I mean, really, if the Soviet Union could be dismantled, so can this presidency.’

It was a beautiful April afternoon in Paris. He walked me back to my hotel. It could be that the times we live in may get even more interesting.

‘Heh. Indeed,’ as the sage once said. But let’s allow Pam herself to have the last word:

of Paris. barbarian horde in the world being told

Some kind of breezy introduction, possibly involving the doorbell.

Andrew Crispin McCarthy, NRO:
Saying No to Justice

I did something today that I’ve never done before. The Department of Justice, which I proudly served for a quarter century as an assistant U.S. attorney and a deputy U.S. marshal, asked me for help, and I declined. Actually, what I declined to do was attend a meeting. My hope is that the dissent I am registering — to the administration’s disastrous policies of releasing trained terrorists and threatening prosecution against government lawyers — will help the department and the Obama administration, even if they don’t want to hear it.

Something to the effect of:

Shorter Ramesh Seamus Ponurru, S.J., O.P., J.D., PhD, O.B.E., America’s Shittiest Website™
Torture and Abortion

• Embryonic stem cell research is far worse than torture because philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas² condemned baby killing but said nusquam nunquam³ about torture, meaning that stem cell research is clearly wrong, while torture is not always clearly wrong. Also, all embryos are innocent human beings.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Oh, now what are they up to this time?

Kathryn Jean Lopez, The Corner:
Andy McCarthy Said "No" to the Justice Department Today

Read this letter that went to the Obama administration this morning.

After being invited by the administration to be a prop in the interrogation debate, the National Review Institute’s former federal prosecutor provides a clear, instructional dissent:

[…] Given your policy of conducting ruinous criminal and ethics investigations of lawyers over the advice they offer the government, and your specific position that the wartime detention I would endorse is tantamount to a violation of law, it makes little sense for me to attend the Task Force meeting. After all, my choice would be to remain silent or risk jeopardizing myself.

It’s too bad he chickened out, because we already did his Obama Death List entry.

ANDREW CLETUS MCCARTHY, onetime assistant federal prosecutor, professional foundation grantee, and National Review writer who got too close to Birth-Certifigate, found on May 4th at the bottom of a long flight of marble steps with every bone in his body broken and rollerblades strapped to his feet. A note was found in his pocket reading, “OMG Obamurderers pushing me down the ack bonk ow donk crunch yow help yak thud blam crack yagh bang clatter bounce slide urk.”

Oh, he may have escaped this time, but our paths will cross again, or my name isn’t…Barack Hussein Soetoro, aa-haa-haa-haa-haaa.